In any subject, you can showcase learning, post reflections, post question prompts, and embed all sorts of tools. Blogging allows you to be creative! This is one of the things I have always loved about the blogging process. Of course, there is the element of creative writing and the opportunity to explore different topics.
Additionally, blogging lets you express yourself visually through custom themes, headers, photography, layouts, and designs. If you remember that a blog is just a blank canvas, you can innovate and mould it into anything you like! Effective two-way communication between home and school is so important. I also love the way that information published on a class blog can be used as conversation starters at home. Educating families and encouraging parent participation in your blog is something I have written about on The Edublogger.
Everyone would agree that teaching students to be safe online is an important issue. However, one-off lessons on digital citizenship are just not going to have a long-lasting effect. Blogging is an excellent method for learning to be a responsible member of an online community in an authentic and ongoing way. I believe the best approach is to neither block young people from being online, or allow them unsupervised access.
The sweet spot is in the middle where we work with our students to mentor them and build their skills and understandings. Blogging provides the perfect avenue to keep the lines of conversation around this topic open. Read more about blogging and digital citizenship in a post I wrote for The Edublogger.
One specific area of digital citizenship that deserves a special mention is digital footprints. Put simply, digital footprints are the traces of what an individual does online. There is a lot of negativity associated with this term. The message I like to promote is that we should protect our digital footprints and try to ensure that they are positive. Encouraging students to avoid posting or doing anything online just seems counterproductive.
A blog can be used to shape the digital footprint of a teacher or students in a carefully curated and positive way. Of course, you need permission for students to post publicly. While some people may be quick to say blogging and social media can inhibit social skills, I see blogging as a terrific starting point. Blogging can allow certain individuals to practise their skills with communication, conversation, empathy and so on. This can be done in simple ways like ensuring you reply to people when they comment on your blog, asking questions to show interest in others, and asking permission before posting about someone else.
Through blogging, many skills are able to be discussed and practised, often incidentally. These can range from keyboard shortcuts, coding, Creative Commons , research skills , using multimedia, troubleshooting and a lot more. Some of these skills are more specific to blogging e. Many bloggers talk about the phenomenon where the process of writing down your thoughts helps to straighten out your thinking, develop your thinking, and basically help you work out what you think.
Personally, I find this to be very true. I often have vague thoughts which develop and come to life as I tap away at the keyboard.
We need space to be able to process information and reflect. Blogging can be a great way to incorporate regular reflection into the classroom program.
Some teachers like to allow this to happen naturally, while others scaffold the reflective process with prompts. Perhaps striving to make your prompts redundant at some stage is a good aim!
Creating a blog requires teamwork and collaboration. Students and teachers learn and share together. A real sense of classroom community can be developed through blogging and establishing a class identity. A class blog mascot can be a fun way to represent your classroom community too. In the traditional classroom, the only audience for student work was the teacher and sometimes classmates and parents. Blogs provide a much larger audience for student work.
They also offer an avenue for feedback and self-improvement through commenting. Motivation seems to increase when students are writing for a purpose. As Dan Pink says , students need autonomy, mastery, and purpose to feel motivated. When publishing online, as opposed to writing in the analogue way, students have the chance to have their voices heard. What a wasted opportunity to not tap into that! Students can write about their passions, concerns, their learning, and more. They can start to feel empowered about making a difference in the world and they can help others understand them.
Of course, this links back to the area of confidence as well. I have found this to be one of the most exciting benefits of blogging. Blogging can help flatten the classroom walls and offer priceless experiences for students and teachers. What are your beliefs and preferences? Blogging will reveal your own story to you! Also, blogging will help you clear up the head and make sense of your own thinking, organize and visualize your ideas, and record your progress.
Many teachers continue to research well beyond their grad school. Just as writing was the way to process and report the findings while back in school, blogging will support the same goals. Turn your blogging into your own degree while writing for a real audience and receiving real feedback. Even though blogging is mainly a writing activity, it will encourage you to read more! Blogging requires reading; reading more books, other blogs, articles, etc. It will, however, alter the way you select and process new information as you will be connecting it to the topics you write about.
You will develop certain filters and improve your ability to analyze and synthesize new information and think critically. Build your own library of content and resources and share it with others. Want to curate a topic? Share your collection on your blog! We all turn to the Internet when searching for ideas or materials. Selecting the best resources and organizing them on your blog will save others a lot of time.
Turn your blogging into your own professional development. Your blog can turn into the best professional development you could ever hope to have.
On this blog, you could also provide course information such as the syllabus, the schedule, posts about assignments, handouts, and course discussions. Curious about how instructors are using blogs in their courses? Here are some examples: American Postmodernism taught by Mark Samples at George Mason University: Samples uses a blog in this course to encourage reflections on course readings.
Archaeology students at Michigan State University: Students in the Campus Archaeology Field School use a blog to engage the public with their excavations. Bears in the Sea is a Baylor University blog that documents the experiences of students and faculty as they participate in the HHMI SEA Strategic Education Alliance by implementing a creative new laboratory experience for students taking introductory biology.
In addition to providing a window into LC Overseas experiences, the site serves as a discussion tool for the group during their time abroad. Program leaders can identify themes for study and assign projects to students.
Students then post photos and descriptive analyses to meet these assignments. The group can then convene and discuss what they have posted. Get Started Blogging at Vanderbilt Vanderbilt has a well-supported blogging service that uses WordPress as its platform. There are a few strategies you can use to make grading online discussions easier: 1.
The journal entry is focused and coherently integrates examples with explanations or analysis. The entry demonstrates awareness of its own limitations or implications, and it considers multiple perspectives when appropriate. The entry reflects in-depth engagement with the topic. The journal entry is reasonably focused, and explanations or analysis are mostly based on examples or other evidence.
Fewer connections are made between ideas, and though new insights are offered, they are not fully developed. The entry reflects moderate engagement with the topic.
The journal entry is mostly description or summary, without consideration of alternative perspectives, and few connections are made between ideas.
The entry reflects passing engagement with the topic. The journal entry is unfocused, or simply rehashes previous comments, and displays no evidence of student engagement with the topic.
The journal entry is missing or consists of one or two disconnected sentences. Provide feedback to students about their blog or discussion board entries. Highlight particularly good blog posts and comments in class and on your blog. Some suggestions include: Display posts on the projector during class, and refer to posts as you lecture.
Encourage students to be creative and include video or music or other media that relates to the topic in their blog posts. You can then play clips in class. Discussion Boards Similar to a blog, a discussion board allows multiple people to respond to comments and questions.
Decide whether students will be allowed to initiate threads. Some faculty prefer to set the context for each discussion, whether the discussion is face-to-face or online.
Others allow students to initiate discussions in one or both environments. Is the threaded discussion a repository for course knowledge or a forum for student exploration?
Can students expect that you will correct misconceptions that surface in the discussion? Make clear to students the terms on which you will participate in the online discussion. Will you be an active participant, committed to reading every post by every student? Or will you read only some of the posts? If you post, should students read your posts as decisive statements on the topics or as exploratory and questioning prompts? How will student posts be evaluated?
If you are evaluating student postings to the online discussions, by what criteria will you be evaluating them? Read and evaluate a student-selected portfolio of postings rather than reading all of the postings.
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